11.04.22

What’s to Come Regarding EPO Scandals and Latest UPC (Unitary Patent) Scandals

Posted in Courtroom, Europe, Patents at 7:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum b23a24ec97aa8d1f9efe214fa3cd6dbf
The Misleading EPO and UPC Facade
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The EPO may think that it can grant millions of European software patents and then introduce kangaroo courts staffed by corporations which lobby for software patents; but wait and watch how scrutiny increases, shaming not just the EPO but unfortunately also the EU (which is implicated via the Unified Patent Court)

This coming weekend we have some internal EPO stuff to show, including some UPC scandals which continue to unfold (they keep delaying and delaying, seeing the growing trouble and the backlash). The above video focuses on the epo.org propaganda machine and its recent activity. As we shall show tomorrow and on Sunday, inside the EPO it’s no picnic and there’s likely to be political intervention some time soon because the EPO is completely off the rails.

It’s a total embarrassment for Europe that EPO crimes have persisted for so long and totally unqualified people (like Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos) ended up on top of the institution, joined by their unqualified buddies, who barely know how patents work or how to operate a patent office. They run it like it’s some store that manufactures and sells candy. EPO autocrats and Team UPC have been mooching off the EU’s goodwill reputation for years; if this carries on, not only the EPO and the UPC will crumble. The EU is angering a lot of people who aren’t “Eurosceptics” but observers of profound institutional corruption. █

Ukraine Was Invaded and Occupied by Microsoft, Too

Posted in Deception, Europe, Finance, Microsoft at 7:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum 1dcd79e191e3720cbaa8d437b4401914
Microsoft Loves War
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Microsoft is taking advantage of the war to cement monopoly in Ukraine and attract the budget of unwilling ‘investors’ (like taxpayers)

Microsoft puff pieces from AP (via ABC) are repeating Microsoft marketing/talking points without any investigation, scrutiny, or even the most basic analysis. Churnalism parrots. This is the shallow kind of nonsense we’re gotten accustomed to seeing from and about Bill Gates (pieces funded by Gates to cover Gates). They pretend that taking over another nation’s infrastructure is some kind of charity, with wording like “Microsoft’s financial commitment of more than $400 million enables the Ukraine government and other organizations to continue using the Microsoft cloud and its public data centers across Europe”, the company’s president, Brad Smith, announced at the annual Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal.”

As we noted earlier, they’re just trying to hijack the country’s infrastructure, furthering their own financial agenda while potentially hiding their losses and pursuing more bailouts from Biden's administration. Some explained to us that these ‘donations’ or ‘aid’ (“Microsoft’s financial commitment of more than $400 million”) can be manipulated into means of hiding major financial losses, calling them “giveaways” instead. The video above explains this point a little more clearly, we hope… █

Googlebombing Against Linux and Web Sites That Help Microsoft Do This

Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 7:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum 9480daf79eee5a9bdc043b2a9b54fee8
Microsoft Pretending It Owns Linux
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The Linux brand is still under attack; when one searches for “Linux” and instead gets Windows and other proprietary Microsoft things perhaps it’s time to consider the possibility that Microsoft intentionally distorts the word as means of brand diffusion/dilution

THERE is ongoing rage over the latest Microsoft/systemd/Lennart Poettering move, in effect trying to lock down Linux and shut out people who exercise Software Freedom. This has been discussed in our IRC channels for several days already.

“It’s frustrating to see a bunch of lies repeated for Microsoft…”The video above goes through all sorts of ways in which Microsoft tries to distort the narrative, bribing prominent bloggers with a “dev kit” and seeding puff pieces about Windows on Raspberry Pi. Phoronix’s front page is shown to highlight the increasing complicity in x86 complexity/hegemony, in effect distracting from systems most suitable for GNU/Linux because Michael Larabel is paid (with gifts [sic]) to promote back-doored, opaque, heavily-patented nonsense designed for Windows, not Linux. It’s frustrating to see a bunch of lies repeated for Microsoft; the loyalty there is to money, not to freedom and Windows-centric sites ‘googlebomb’ the word/name “Linux” with headlines such as “Thanks to Microsoft you could soon run multiple nested Windows inside Linux” (yay! MOAR Windows!!).

“If the identity of the brand is not preserved, then more people will refer to the system as “GNU/Linux”, seeking to be clearer about what they stand for or advocate.”Microsoft isn’t a buddy of Linux. Microsoft attacks Linux and what better way to attack than by doing it from the inside? That’s rather easy to see and it’s pretty revealing that they are actually trying to promote Windows, not “Linux” (all sorts of Windows things they inaccurately describe using the trademark “Linux”, with the blessing of the so-called ‘Linux’ Foundation because it gets paid by Microsoft).

If the identity of the brand is not preserved, then more people will refer to the system as “GNU/Linux”, seeking to be clearer about what they stand for or advocate. █

Links 04/11/2022: NuTyX 22.10.0 and Akademy 2022 Highlights

Posted in News Roundup at 3:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Applications

      • Medevel ☛ 14 Open Source Free NVR Solutions For Home and Business Security

        An NVR or Network Video Recorder program is a part of a digital video surveillance system that allows recording CCTV through the network into a digital recorder.

        As the market has many commercial and enterprise software, which are sometimes overpriced, here we offer you a list of open-source free NVR alternative solutions.

        We published an article about open source CCTV systems which contains some complete NVR/ DVR systems, however, since many search for NVR systems, we compiled this list for you.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • H2S Media ☛ How to install Clipgrab on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Linux – Linux Shout

        Learn the commands to install Clipgrab on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish for downloading YouTube videos on Linux distros.

        If you are thinking about how to download youtube videos directly on Ubuntu Linux then ClipGrab is the answer. It is open-source software that offers a simple-to-understand GUI for grabbing videos via major video portals such as YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, Instagram, and Facebook.

        ClipGrab is a free video downloader that cannot only save online videos but also the audio track of video clips from the internet quickly. This free video downloader software work on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

      • Javier Martinez Canillas ☛ How to install Fedora on an HP X2 Chromebook | Blog | Javier Martinez Canillas

        We have been working lately with Enric Balletbo and Dorinda Bassey to improve the support for the HP X2 Chromebook in Fedora. This post explains how to install Fedora on that Chromebook.

      • OKLCH in CSS: why we moved from RGB and HSL

        oklch() is a new way to define CSS colors. In oklch(L C H) or oklch(L C H / a) each item corresponds as follows:

        L is perceived lightness (0%-100%). “Perceived” means that it has predicted contrast, unlike L in hsl().

        C is chroma, from gray to the most saturated color.

        H is the hue angle (0-360).

        a is opacity (0-1 or 0-100%).

      • uni Toronto ☛ The problem of getting problem reports from (our) people

        We have a somewhat unusual problem, which is that we often don’t get many problem reports from our users. To be specific, not infrequently we don’t get problem reports even when there are problems. Sometimes it’s possible that people simply haven’t noticed the problem, but other times either they don’t report the problem or they don’t necessarily know that something is supposed to work in the first place.

      • Manuel Matuzovic ☛ Day 29: !important custom properties

        Using !important with custom properties might not work as you expect.

        If you look at the following example, which color does the text have?

      • Make Tech Easier ☛ How to Create a Web Archive With Archivebox – Make Tech Easier

        Archivebox is an easy-to-use archival program that allows you to create an accurate snapshot of any website. This can be helpful for archivists and users that want to preserve information online. Not only that, Archivebox is also incredibly simple and easy to use. For example, you can run the program both as a command line tool and as a web app that you can access anywhere.

      • ZDNet ☛ How to add tab groups to Firefox for a more organized and efficient experience
      • FOSSLinux ☛ How to install Google Chat on Ubuntu | FOSS Linux

        Google chat is a communication service created by Google. It was previously designed for business environments and teams; however, it has since been made accessible to the general public/consumers. The software offers group messages or conversations, direct messages, and spaces.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install MinIO Storage on Rocky Linux

        MinIO is a free and open-source object storage server written in Go. It’s compatible with Amazone S3 object storage and is one of the best and most free solutions for object storage.

      • DebugPoint ☛ Completely Remove Snap from Ubuntu Linux [Tutorial]

        A tutorial on how to remove Snap from Ubuntu Linux and getting a snap-free system.

        Snap packages developed by Canonical are beneficial for several use cases. It provides an easy and faster update of applications directly to the end-users. Not only that, it has several other benefits, such as it comes with all dependencies packaged and allows multiple installations of the same applications. Furthermore, it runs in a sandbox mode providing security and other benefits.

        Among all these benefits, there are other debatable drawbacks of Snap tech. For example, almost every user who used Snap reported its slower performance, including its startup time, compared to native deb or RPM packages. In addition, due to its design, the application installation size is huge and costs disk space because it packages all the dependencies.

        Not only that, but due to its sandbox nature, the Snap apps may not access several areas of your Linux desktop until managed with proper permission.

      • Javier Martinez Canillas ☛ How to install Fedora on an HP X2 Chromebook | Blog | Javier Martinez Canillas

        We have been working lately with Enric Balletbo and Dorinda Bassey to improve the support for the HP X2 Chromebook in Fedora. This post explains how to install Fedora on that Chromebook.

      • Citizix ☛ How to install Docker Engine in Debian 11 using Ansible

        Docker is an open source containerization platform. It enables developers to package applications into containers—standardized executable components combining application source code with the operating system (OS) libraries and dependencies required to run that code in any environment.

      • Make Use Of ☛ How to Create Better Linux Terminal GIFs With VHS

        The Linux terminal is a wonderful tool that helps you get the best out of your machine. Most people learn to use it by following tutorials with line-by-line instructions. But a better way may be to see it in action.

    • Games

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Qt ☛ Akademy 2022 Highlights

          This year, KDE organised its annual community conference, Akademy 2022, in Barcelona.

          Akademy is the annual world summit of KDE, one of the largest Free Software communities in the world. It is a free, non-commercial event organized by the KDE Community.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • New Releases

      • NuTyX 22.10.0 available with cards 2.6.1

        The NuTyX team is happy to announce the new version of NuTyX 22.10.0 and cards 2.6.1.

        New toolchain gcc 12.2.0, glibc 2.36 and binutils 2.39.

        The xorg-server graphics server version 21.1.4, the Mesa 3D library in 22.1.7, Gtk4 4.8.2 and Qt 6.4.1

        The python interpreters are at 3.10.8 and 2.7.18.

        The XFCE desktop environment is updated to version 4.16.1.

        The MATE desktop environment is a 1.26.0 version .

        The GNOME desktop environment is also updated to version 42.4

        The KDE desktop environment is available in Plasma 5.26.2, Framework 5.99.0 and applications in 22.08.2.

        Available browsers are: Firefox 106.0.3, Chromium 107.0.5304.87, Epiphany 42.4, etc

        Many desktop applications have been updated as well like Telegram-desktop 4.1.1, Thunderbird 102.4.1, Scribus 1.5.8, Libreoffice 7.4.2.3, Gimp 2.10.32, etc.

    • BSD

      • FreeBSD ☛ FreeBSD Journal

        Don’t forget! The FreeBSD Journal is now free and available only on the Browser-Based Edition.

      • MWL ☛ Two pieces by me in this month’s FreeBSD Journal

        Yes, I’m trying to use the blog more, rather than dumping everything to multiple social media outlets. Yes, this is in part in response to Comic Book Supervillain purchasing Twitter and kneecapping the moderation team. If you want me on social media, I’m on the fediverse as @mwlucas@bsd.network.

    • Devices/Embedded

      • Linux Gizmos ☛ Stick PC available with Gemini Lake or Jasper Lake CPUs

        The MeLE PCG02 Pro is a fanless PC compatible with the Celeron J4125 or the Celeron N5105 Intel processors. The device is as big as an iPhone 14 pro, but it packs flexible peripherals such as dual [email protected] HDMI ports, one GbE RJ45, dual UBS 3.2 ports, etc.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Hackaday ☛ Thin Client And Smartphone Step In For 3D Printer’s Raspberry Pi And Touchscreen

        It’s no secret that Raspberry Pi’s are a little hard to come by these days. Unless you had the foresight to stock up before the supply dried up — and if you did, we want to talk to you — chances are good that you’ve got a fair number of projects that use the ubiquitous SBC on indefinite hold. And maybe that’s got you thinking about alternatives to the Pi.

      • SparkFun Electronics ☛ LED Brightness Standardization

        Howdy folks! I’m Dryw, a new engineer here at SparkFun! I joined in March of this year and have already released a handful of products, such as those Bosch pressure sensors and the IoT Redboard – ESP32. I’ve also been working on some more exciting products that will be coming out soon, stay tuned for those!

        As I’ve been working here, I’ve noticed a lot of our products use different resistor values for LEDs. Consistent LED brightness hasn’t been a critical design requirement for us, which has resulted in different brightnesses across our catalog. The most severe example I saw was on a prototype, where the green and yellow LEDs were barely visible, and the red and blue LEDs felt like staring into the sun! So I made it my mission to find the perfect resistor for each of our LEDs, in order to give a consistent brightness across all our products, and to never need sunglasses ever again!

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Why I Moved to Fosstodon

      Back in January I wrote Why I Use Librem Social. Librem Social is a social media network that is based on a fork of Mastodon. About a month after I wrote that, I decided to migrate to a different instance. Fosstodon is where I landed and I’ve quite enjoyed my experience there.

    • Remy Van Elst ☛ Spinrite 6.0 on UEFI and an NVMe SSD drive

      Spinrite is a hard drive recovery and maintenande utility written by Steve Gibson from Gibson Research Corporation. It is marketed on the Security Now TWiT podcast which I often listen to. I have bought a copy of it and sometimes use it on solid state disks or SD cards. Spinrite 6.0 is written is assembly language and runs on top of MS-DOS or FreeDOS, using the BIOS. UEFI is not supported and neither are NVMe drives. This post will show you how to run Spinrite 6.0 on such a system anyway, using a modern linux live USB drive that can boot on UEFI only system and Virtualbox, exposing the NVMe disk as a SATA drive.

    • Tor ☛ New Release: Tor Browser 11.5.7 (Windows, macOS, Linux)

      This is a minor release for desktop platforms intended to facilitate the single-locale to multi-locale bundle upgrade coming with the 12.0 series later this month.

    • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

    • GNU Projects

      • GNU ☛ GNU lightning – News: GNU lightning 2.1.4 release [Savannah]

        GNU lightning is a library to aid in making portable programs that compile assembly code at run time.

        Development:

        http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/lightning.git

        Download release:
        ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/lightning/lightning-2.1.4.tar.gz

        2.1.4 main features are the new Loongarch port, currently supporting only Linux 64 bit, and a new rewrite of the register live and unknown state logic. Now it should be faster to generate code.

    • Programming/Development

      • OpenShift’s oc debug and parallel execution

        A colleague reported some issues in the OpenShift troubleshooting and diagnosis scripts at OpenShift-checks.

        Some time ago I did contribute some changes to use functions and allow using the RISU wrapper to the scripts, helping consuming the results via RISU’s HTML interface.

        As my colleague reported, for some plugins, the output of the command was not shown in the HTML Interface.

      • ZDNet ☛ Stack Overflow CEO on how it became the world’s most popular programming site
      • Steve Kemp ☛ Alphabetical linting ..

        This included examples of scanning comments above classes to ensure they referred to the appropriate object, ensuring that specific function calls always included a specific (optional) parameter, etc.

        Nothing too complex, but I figured I’d give a new example this time, and I remembered I’d recently written a bunch of functions for an interpreter which I’d ordered quite deliberately.

      • Raspberry Pi ☛ Get kids creating webpages with HTML and CSS

        With our new free ‘Introduction to web development’ path, young people are able to learn HTML and create their own webpages on topics that matter to them. The path is made up of six projects that show children and teenagers how to structure pages using HTML, and style them using CSS.

      • Perl / Raku

      • Python

        • Python Speed ☛ Good old-fashioned code optimization never goes out of style

          Sometimes, making your Python data processing software faster doesn’t require libraries like NumPy or Pandas, or specialized techniques like vectorization. In fact, if you’re doing string processing, libraries like Pandas won’t help.

          Pushing calculation down to a faster implementation is just one way to speed up software. Another way to get faster results is to remove code that is redundant, repetitive, superfluous, needless, or otherwise does unnecessary work. The fastest software, after all, is software that doesn’t run at all.

          In short, sometimes all you need is some good old-fashioned speed optimization.

  • Leftovers

    • Counter Punch ☛ Roaming Charges: History Ain’t Changed

      Thankfully one of our longtime supporters has stepped up this week and promised to match every donation of $50 or more through next week. The matching grant is landing right on time, but it will only make a dent in our modest goal if our readers pitch in. C’mon, let’s end this thing and get on to the very important matters at hand.

    • Counter Punch ☛ Goodbye Pork Pie Hat: Mike Davis, 1946-2022

      Mike spoke to us in a way that few of his generation could have, because he was listening so closely to young people, putting himself in our shoes, especially as he patrolled the meaner streets of LA to learn about them, to show that they were not mean to learners like him, comparing what he knew of previous generations in the city to what he was hearing from young people and envisioning for their future.

    • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Drum and the Cardinal

      My friends Scott and Betsey gave me a drum a few weeks ago. I played it as I sat with them . . . and I certainly mean the word “play” as childishly as you can imagine. I’m no more a musician than I am a nuclear physicist, but I played along with them and, well, this is what happens to me: I notice big things emerge in incredibly small moments.

    • The Nation ☛ Mike Leigh’s High Hopes

      Midway through Mike Leigh’s 1988 film High Hopes, a leftist couple visits Karl Marx’s tomb in London’s Highgate Cemetery. Cyril Bender is a 35-year-old messenger suffering from political disenchantment; Shirley is his equanimous, green-thumbed girlfriend. Gazing at Marx’s bust, Cyril muses on his importance to Britain’s welfare state, while Shirley notes the bathos of his enlarged forehead, looming over the graves of his family.

    • The Nation ☛ How Saidiya Hartman Changed the Study of Black Life

      Saidiya Hartman has shaped studies of Black life for over two decades. Her first book, 1997’s Scenes of Subjection, argued that slavery was foundational to the American project and its notions of liberty. Her follow-up, 2006’s Lose Your Mother, combines elements of historiography and memoir in exploring the experience and legacy of enslavement. Here she first used a speculative method of writing history given the silences of the archive. And her most recent book, 2019’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, examines the revolution of everyday life enacted in the practices of young Black women and queer people that created and sustained expansive notions of freedom.

    • David Revoy ☛ Derivation: Motion Comic Ep.3 by Morevna

      Here is a new animation from the Morevna studio. The movie was published last week and I immediately reshared it on all my social medias. But now I can take the time to write a blog-post about it, so it joins my collection of derivations.

    • Pro Publica ☛ City Officials Withhold Key Information of Chicago Fire FC Land Deal

      The CHA has told city aldermen that the Chicago Fire soccer team will likely pay up to $40 million to lease the 23-acre site for 40 or more years, with the proceeds used to benefit low-income families. But CHA officials have been secretive about specifics of the deal, including how they arrived at that price for prime land in a gentrifying neighborhood.

    • Counter Punch ☛ Crisis Or Catastrophe: Nothing Changes

      So, what can be said, written or done to engender substantive change, to shake up complacent corporate-orientated governments, profit obsessed businesses and weary anxious individuals?

    • Counter Punch ☛ Judgement in Reverse: the New Design for the Sainsbury Wing Entrance of the National Gallery, London

      A short walk through the centre of London or even its outskirts or indeed most built up places on the globe induces in me an appalled reaction at the impersonal, bland, glass and concrete overblown manifestations of self-consumed egos with apparently no feeling for human beings, only for some horrendous fusion of Moloch and 1984.

    • Counter Punch ☛ Amtraks Across America: the New Penn Station

      No doubt because devils possessed me, I came up with the idea to travel around the United States this past summer on an Amtrak pass, one of those deals that would give me ten “segments” (the Amtrak expression for short-term incarceration) in a month.

    • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Roevember Will Tell: Women Scorned on a Hot Planet

      We’ve all heard the idiom, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” Multiply that by 64,543,832 U.S. women of childbearing age, not to mention all those who care about them, and you get a political situation that is as hot as our overheated planet. Well, Rovember is here and Election Day, Tuesday, November 8th, will prove to those politicians, cowering in the shadows after their dirty deeds, that there will be hell to pay at the ballot box on reproductive choice, climate change, and in defense of democracy itself.

    • Science

      • Vice Media Group ☛ Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works [Ed: That just means the classifiers work at a higher scale than before. None of this is new except buzzwords and hype.]

        AI researchers are warning developers to focus more on how and why a system produces certain results than the fact that the system can accurately and rapidly produce them.

      • uni MIT ☛ Study urges caution when comparing neural networks to the brain

        In the field of neuroscience, researchers often use neural networks to try to model the same kind of tasks that the brain performs, in hopes that the models could suggest new hypotheses regarding how the brain itself performs those tasks. However, a group of researchers at MIT is urging that more caution should be taken when interpreting these models.

      • Wired ☛ The Sci-Fi Dream of a ‘Molecular Computer’ Is Getting More Real | WIRED

        DAVID LEIGH DREAMS of building a small machine. Really small. Something minuscule. Or more like … molecule. “Chemists like me have been working on trying to turn molecules into machines for about 25 years now,” says Leigh, an organic chemist from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. “And of course, it’s all baby steps. You’re building on all those that went before you.”

        In 1936, English mathematician Alan Turing imagined an autonomous machine capable of carrying out any precisely coded algorithm. The hypothetical machine would read a strip of tape dotted with symbols that, when interpreted sequentially, would instruct the machine to act. It might transcribe, translate, or compute—turning code into a message, or a math problem into an answer. The Turing machine was a prophetic vision of modern computers. While your laptop doesn’t rely on tape to run programs, the philosophy behind it is the same. “That laid the foundation for modern computing,” says Leigh.

      • eSecurity Planet ☛ History of Computer Viruses – Malware | What Was Their Impact?

        Though they had yet to be named, computer viruses were first conceptualized by Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann, who designed a self-replicating computer program that some consider to be the precursor to computer viruses, even if it was never developed or deployed in the way computer viruses eventually would be. Though this work began in the 1940s, it, along with his other work in the field of self-replication, was eventually compiled and distributed via the 1966 paper “Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata.”

        Though von Neumann’s self-replicating program was more or less a thought experiment, computer programmer Bob Thomas developed the Creeper program in 1971, which is often cited as the first computer virus. Named after a character from “Scooby-Doo,” the Creeper was originally intended as a security test for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the precursor of the modern Internet we know, love, and sometimes hate.

        As a security test, the Creeper’s effects on infected machines were minimal. It would simply display a message on the computer’s screen: “I’M THE CREEPER. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN!” A polite little virus, the Creeper would also try to remove itself from its host whenever it would infect a new hard drive.

        Though polite, the Creeper was still an annoyance to some, and in 1971, Ray Tomlinson developed the first antivirus software, called Reaper. The Reaper would glide across ARPANET, scanning for and removing any instances of the Creeper it found there.

    • Education

      • Idiomdrottning ☛ Email Netiquette

        What I’m over, though, is advice that’s about how horrible everyone else is emailing. We needed email but people got stressed out and they started flocking to these silo sites like Facebook and Twitter which have a more codified interaction pattern that enforces or rewards brevity, picture tagging, and event scheduling. If we wanna get people back into email then we can’t be all shamey and gatekeepy about it.♥

      • Zach Flower ☛ Merit Badges for Grownups

        I’ve always been a bit of a collector of hobbies. I like to learn new things, and enjoy the satisfaction that comes from exercising a newly acquired skill. Granted, it makes for a pretty clear jack-of-all-trades mentality (master of none), but understanding and applying the basics of painting, or lock picking, or genealogy isn’t about mastery, but exploration.

        That said, I do wish the paths towards my randomly selected destinations were a little better defined (and that I got a cool badge at some predetermined checkpoint). But, are there merit badges for adults?

    • Hardware

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ AMD announce RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT, plus FSR3 teased

        Today at the AMD “together we advance_gaming” event, AMD revealed their new RDNA3 architecture along with the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT GPUs. Both of these new cards will be available on December 13th, and AMD threw plenty of shade at NVIDIA of the power use and connector issues during the event talking about how “easy” it is to upgrade to it and noting the power use. 

      • Hackaday ☛ Just How Fast Could You Charge An IPhone?

        An iPhone 8, now a relatively cheap model, can charge its battery fully in two hours’ time. There’s hardly ever a need for faster charging, but it’s fair to ask – how much faster could it really go? [Scotty Allen] from [Strange Parts], back after a hiatus, is back to stretching the limits of what a regular iPhone can do, and decides to start off with an exploration of battery technologies.

      • Hackaday ☛ LED Diffusers Confusing? Organize A Practical Contest

        We all want a nice and shiny LED strip that doesn’t actually look like it consists of individual LEDs – a bar of uniform light is just that much more attractive. There’s all kinds of diffusion options available out there, but they can be confusing – sometimes you’d just like to know, which one is better? If there’s one thing that could easily settle this, it’s a practical test, and that’s what [The Hook Up] has devised for us to learn from.

      • Hackaday ☛ Turbo Button Pays Charming Homage To Early Personal Computers

        The PC turbo button and LED clock speed display were common features on early personal computers. Wanting to add a little retro chic to his modern battle-station, [Matthew Frost] assembled a charming and functional homage to the turbo button control panel.

      • Hackaday ☛ 3-DOF Robot Arm Wrist Without The Motor Weight

        A major challenge of robotic arms is the weight of the actuators, especially closer to the end of the arm. The long lever arm means more torque is required from the other actuators, and everything flexes a bit more. To get around this, [RoTechnic] moved the wrist stepper motors off the arms entirely.

      • Hackaday ☛ Walnut Case Sets This Custom Arduino-Powered RPN Calculator Apart From The Crowd

        How many of us have an everyday tool that’s truly unique? Likely not many of us; take a look around your desk and turn out your pockets, but more often than not, what you’ll find is that everything you have is something that pretty much everyone else on the planet could have bought too. But not so if you’ve got this beautiful custom RPN calculator in a wooden case.

      • Hackaday ☛ Adjusting Shelves Like It’s 1899

        In most modern homes, any adjustable shelves or cabinets have metal shelf pins set inside conveniently spaced holes. Before the accoutrements of modern life, like easily replicated metal parts, you may have found a sawtooth shelf doing the same job with just wood.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

    • Proprietary

      • ABC ☛ Microsoft extends aid for Ukraine’s wartime tech innovation [Ed: Taking advantage of wars to put back doors in foreign countries and potentially remote controls of sort. Worse yet, these 'donations' or 'aid' can be manipulated into means of hiding major financial losses, calling them "giveaways" instead]

        Microsoft’s financial commitment of more than $400 million enables the Ukraine government and other organizations to continue using the Microsoft cloud and its public data centers across Europe, the company’s president, Brad Smith, announced at the annual Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

    • Security

      • Krebs On Security ☛ Hacker Charged With Extorting Online Psychotherapy Service – Krebs on Security
      • ACM ☛ Samsung Breach Slams Consumers

        “Samsung recently discovered a cybersecurity incident that affected some of your information,” the breach notification read. Samsung addressed the email to me and other customers involved in the breach.

        On Sept. 2, Samsung notified specific U.S. customers that a late July breach affected some of their data inside U.S. systems. According to the breach notification, customers had differing combinations of their names, contact and demographic data, birthdays, and product registration information stolen. The breach only involved Samsung’s servers, according to AppleInsider; Samsung consumer devices and in-app control interfaces remained untouched.

        “We want to assure our customers that the issue did not impact Social Security numbers or credit or debit card numbers,” the Samsung email continued. We know little about the late July breach, which Samsung confirmed internally by early August, though it didn’t disclose it until September.

        Litigants in a class action suit against Samsung Electronics of America asserted that the July breach, together with one in March, affected more than half of U.S. Samsung customers, according to Dark Reading.

        That’s a lot of people to leave in the dark. All my emails to the Samsung address generated automated responses about the breach, with no new information. We can surmise as much from what we don’t know about the breach as what we know.

      • Bruce Schneier ☛ NSA on Supply Chain Security – Schneier on Security

        The NSA (together with CISA) has published a long report on supply-chain security: “Securing the Software Supply Chain: Recommended Practices Guide for Suppliers.“:

      • LWN ☛ Security updates for Friday [LWN.net]

        Security updates have been issued by Debian (clickhouse, distro-info-data, and ntfs-3g), Fedora (firefox), Oracle (kernel), Slackware (mozilla), and SUSE (python-Flask-Security-Too).

      • Hacker News ☛ Researchers Detail New Malware Campaign Targeting Indian Government Employees> [Ed: Windows TCO]

        The Transparent Tribe threat actor has been linked to a new campaign aimed at Indian government organizations with trojanized versions of a two-factor authentication solution called Kavach.

        “This group abuses Google advertisements for the purpose of malvertising to distribute backdoored versions of Kavach multi-authentication (MFA) applications,” Zscaler ThreatLabz researcher Sudeep Singh said in a Thursday analysis.

        The cybersecurity company said the advanced persistent threat group has also conducted low-volume credential harvesting attacks in which rogue websites masquerading as official Indian government websites were set up to lure unwitting users into entering their passwords.

        Transparent Tribe, also known by the monikers APT36, Operation C-Major, and Mythic Leopard, is a suspected Pakistan adversarial collective that has a history of striking Indian and Afghanistan entities.

        [...]

        This website is also surfaced as a top result in Google searches, effectively acting as a gateway to redirect users looking for the app to the .NET-based fraudulent installer.

      • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

        • SMS Multifactor Authentication in Antarctica

          Needless to say, there are currently no cell phone towers, from any carrier, at US stations in Antarctica.

          It’s worthwhile to convert as many systems as possible to use non-SMS MFA (such as TOTP, security key, etc). This is good general security practice, Antarctica or not.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • Site36 ☛ German secret service law does not have to go into the shredder

          The Federal Constitutional Court has ruled that the domestic secret service violates the principle of separation. The legislature should therefore amend the law

        • Chat Control: Your private messages will be scanned

          The EU commission has proposed a new law to protect children against abuse. The cause is good, but the law itself is bad🤔, because it requires that online services with messaging functionality have to be surveilled🧐 if there is a possibility for children👶 to use the service or if users could potentially use the service to exchange child abuse material📲. This will affect many communication services and it will mean that your communication will be scanned📳, because all users of regular communication services will be treated as suspects for child abuse👮. More specifically this means that your e-mails💌, chat-messages🗨, video- and voicecalls🎤 will be analysed by algorithms🤖, to determine if they contain illegal content🔫. The analysis will happen directly on your computer/smartphone💻, so that the algorithms can see what you say/write before it becomes encrypted🤫.

        • TikTok is “unacceptable security risk” and should be removed from app stores, says FCC

          ByteDance, a company based in Beijing, developed TikTok. In China, it is known as Douyin. Carr mentioned in his letter to Apple and Google that ByteDance “is beholden to the Communist Party of China and required by Chinese law to comply with the PRC’s surveillance demands.”

          The Senate and House committee members, cybersecurity researchers, privacy, and civil rights groups have flagged this as a concern. In 2019, two senators labeled TikTok as a “potential counterintelligence threat we cannot ignore”. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is also concerned about the social platform’s “vague” policies, especially in collecting and using biometric data.

        • Patrick Breyer ☛ Bundestag legal experts find: EU Chat Control CSAM scanner plan would not hold up in court

          In their opinion the law would negatively impact communication behaviour of minors and generally freedom of speech and expression. Furthermore, the opinion questions the practicability of scanning technology which would produce a high number of false positives even with a low error rate, due to the sheer number of messages scanned. Lastly, the analysis echos fears already expressed in civil society for the future of end-to-end encryption. The paper points out that regardless of the technical design for circumventing encryption, third parties would be able to gain access, creating an additional threat to cyber security.

        • Shadowproof ☛ NSA Whistleblower Unearthed ‘Project’ That Targeted US Communications

          The unauthorized project started collecting—or attempting to collect data—that included US persons’ communications as early as 2012.According to the whistleblower, multiple people in NSA oversight positions lacked the technical expertise to understand what the analyst was doing with their project. They did not understand why the analyst’s collection was in violation of clear procedures.The inspector general concluded, “Although [the analyst] was told by different supervisors, oversight officials, and attorneys that his activities were acceptable, he was told by others to stop immediately.”“[The analyst] acted with reckless disregard of the regulations, policies, and procedures that governed the use of the SIGINT system,” the inspector general added, which essentially means he abused his access to programs that enabled mass surveillance.

        • The Dissenter ☛ NSA Whistleblower Unearthed ‘Project’ That Targeted US Communications

    • Defence/Aggression

    • Environment

      • Energy

        • Counter Punch ☛ Clean Energy is Booming  (Here’s the Bad News)

          On the one hand, this might seem surprising; One of the most important things we can do to combat the climate crisis, we are told, is to build a lot more clean energy. The recently passed climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, is largely built on this premise. Easily the most ambitious climate legislation ever passed, it is loaded with incentives to build more solar and wind, and to encourage the purchase of electric vehicles.

        • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Media Frenzy Over High Gas Prices Obscures an Inconvenient Truth

          Journalist and media critic James Fallows did us a service by recently pointing out in a couple of his of his posts that among the media’s most unexamined and hoary clichés is that fabled phrase, used whenever the media senses a subject it can beat to death: “prices at the pump.” I Googled it, and turned up over 1.4 million hits. So what’s wrong with it?

        • DeSmog ☛ ‘Drop Fossil Fuels,’ Over 400 Scientists Tell PR Firm Handling UN Climate Talks

          “These clients have not taken the fundamental steps necessary to address the climate emergency and sharply rein in fossil fuels,” states an open letter to Hill+Knowlton signed by over 420 scientists. “Instead, they have used Hill+Knowlton and other PR agencies to spin, delay, and mislead, in order to continue expanding fossil fuel production and thereby increasing heat-trapping emissions.”

        • Counter Punch ☛ Climate Activism on the Brink of Nuclear War

          But you can’t reach zero or even net zero carbon emissions by blowing up gas pipelines. That just makes people frantic, as they face astronomical fuel prices and freezing winters with no heat. Then they do things like reviving the use of coal, chopping down forests to burn another dirty source of energy, wood, and deciding nuclear power might save them (it won’t), as has happened in energy-starved Europe. To make matters worse, the Nordstream explosion caper released 300,000 metric tons of methane into the atmosphere, the equivalent of the annual emissions of one million cars and the largest ever discharge of methane. This is a climate crime, because methane is a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon.

      • Wildlife/Nature

    • Finance

      • Credit Card Shenanigans: How to trigger a fraud alert in two transactions.

        Being in Antarctica is weird, because you can travel back and forth between the “United States” (McMurdo) and “New Zealand” (Scott Base) in less than 30 minutes.

        Credit card companies have a hard time with this.

      • Counter Punch ☛ How the Elites are Really Screwing the Masses

        From the standpoint of an individual worker, or the economy, it doesn’t matter if their labor is no longer needed due to an assembly line speed-up, greater efficiency in organizing the workplace, or robots. In all three cases, fewer workers are needed. The obsession with automation as something new and different is completely misplaced.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | How Progressives Would Handle the Current Energy, Inflation, and Climate Crises

        While the climate crisis is deepening and households are falling into poverty, inflation and soaring energy bills, fossil fuel firms are enjoying their tax breaks and reporting quarterly record profits. Market analysis on energy prices predicts continuing high prices of gas for the next two years. This is not just due to the uncertainties created by the Russian occupation of Ukraine, but rather the movement of gas assets in forward markets. Forward markets create facilities used for speculative purposes, as well as for hedging, which means energy prices will continue to rise and we will continue to see phenomenal record profits by fossil fuel companies.

      • Common Dreams ☛ This Graph Shows Where Surging Corporate Profits Increasingly Go: Tax Havens

        The United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) studied corporate profits and profit-shifting between 1975 and 2019, finding that the diversion of massive profits is a “relatively new phenomenon.”

      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Drowning Our Democracy’: US Billionaires Have Pumped Nearly $900,000,000 Into Midterms

        “Money talks when it comes to influencing candidates and winning elections, and the loudest voices by far are billionaires.”

      • Common Dreams ☛ Top Economist at Major Global Bank Says Corporate Profits Are Fueling Inflation

        “Powell’s public remarks offer little insight into how he expects higher rates to tame inflation,” Paul Donovan of UBS Global Wealth Management wrote just ahead of the Fed’s latest interest rate increase of 75 basis points. “This is the current inflation story. Companies have passed higher costs on to customers. But they have also taken advantage of circumstances to expand profit margins. The broadening of inflation beyond commodity prices is more profit margin expansion than wage cost pressures.”

      • Common Dreams ☛ Powell Wasn’t Asked a Single Question About Corporate Profits Driving Inflation

        Progressive economists have estimated that corporate profits are to blame for at least 40% of price increases during the recovery from the pandemic-induced downturn, a disproportionate contribution to the stubbornly high inflation that is eating away at workers’ wages. Some have put the number at over 50%.

      • The Nation ☛ Black Friday: A Good Day to “Make Amazon Pay”

        Last year Amazon rang up record-breaking sales between Black Friday—the day after Thanksgiving—and Cyber Monday. According to data from Numerator, the company captured 17.7 percent of Black Friday dollars—more than any other retailer.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Corporate Lobbying ‘Onslaught’ Tanked Anti-Price Gouging Bills as Inflation Surged

        That’s according to a report published Thursday by Public Citizen and the Groundwork Collaborative, which scoured federal lobbying disclosures to examine how trade groups and individual corporations have worked to shield their pricing power at the expense of the consumers.

      • The Nation ☛ Debt and Inequality Will Be Key Issues at the UN’s Next Climate Conference

        Delegates from nearly 200 nations, as well as hundreds of activists and representatives from nongovernmental organizations that focus on climate change and the environment, are convening in November in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, for the UN climate negotiations, known as the Conference of the Parties (COP). At this year’s version, COP27, nations will once again work together to achieve the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which requires each country to submit a detailed plan to reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. The UN gathers these binding commitments, known as Nationally Determined Contributions, to establish what the collective impact will be. In accordance with the Paris treaty, nations agreed to submit their NDCs by 2020 and then report back every five years. The plan was to ramp up commitments in successive years. And change is needed soon: The Paris Agreement reminds us that 2030 is the critical year by which global CO2 emissions must have been reduced by 45 percent to avoid the irreversible consequences of climate change.

      • Scheerpost ☛ The Truth About Cargill: The Most Evil Company

        Behind The Headlines The biggest supervillains in the world are not human, they’re corporations. On this episode of The Most Censored News with Lee Camp, Cargill Inc. gets dragged into the light. The agricultural conglomerate is the largest privately-held corporation in the U.S. by a large margin, and the current price […]

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Elmo’s Forced Marriage

        I feel like a lot of the commentary about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter — which includes a great deal of Kremlinology about what Elmo says on Twitter — has forgotten how we got here.

        Elmo entered what is effectively a forced marriage.

        Consider this dramatic reenactment: [...]

      • Variety ☛ Elon Musk’s Twitter to Make Massive Layoffs Friday via Email

        The companywide email did not indicate how big the cutbacks would be. Musk has been planning to axe about 50% of the staff, or around 3,700 of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, according to a Bloomberg report earlier.

        Musk has already indicated that he would make job cuts at Twitter, telling employees at a town-hall meeting this summer that there needs to be “a rationalization of headcount” at the social network. On Oct. 30, asked by someone on Twitter to identify “the one thing that’s most messed-up at Twitter right now,” Musk replied, “There seem to be 10 people ‘managing’ for every one person coding” at Twitter.

      • [Old] Next Cloud ☛ European Governments work with Nextcloud to build Digitally Sovereign Office

        As covered in the press (Handelsblatt, AGConnect, Heise), we have been working for some time on building a strong Nextcloud Office for use in the public sector. This will help governments regain their independence from a small number of tech giants and allow them to confidently roll out digitization efforts.

        As most of our readers are likely aware, there has been a wave of recent decisions and Data Protection Office announcements from government agencies all over Europe about the legal challenges of hosting confidential data on especially US cloud services. Most recently the Procurement Chamber of the German state Baden-Württemberg decided US cloud services are not GDPR compliant, but they have been preceded by Dutch, Swedish and many other governments and data protection offices coming to that same conclusion.

        This creates a significant need in federal and local government offices working with personal data from citizens for an independent, on-premises, trustworthy collaboration platform. An office solution that is GDPR compliant, open source, standards-compliant, easy to use, performant and decentralized is key for this.

      • TruthOut ☛ 465 Billionaires Have Pumped an Eye-Popping $881 Million Into the Midterms
      • TruthOut ☛ Nonprofit Watchdog Group Promises to Sue Trump if He Tries to Run For President
      • TruthOut ☛ Pelosi Attack Could Portend Right-Wing Violence on Election Day, Experts Warn
      • TruthOut ☛ RNC Has Filed 73 Lawsuits in the 2022 Election Cycle, With More to Come
      • TruthOut ☛ GOP Nominee Vows Party “Will Never Lose Another Election” in WI If He Wins
      • Counter Punch ☛ The Global Food System Enables Russia to Use Food as a Weapon

        Still, that one conflict, in a relatively short period of time, can generate such serious problems in terms of food access belies deeper problems in global supply chains, especially with respect to agriculture.

      • Counter Punch ☛ From Attica to Daunte Wright

        Prisoners spent 14 to 16 hours a day in their cells, their mail was read, their reading material restricted, their visits from families conducted through a mesh screen, their medical care disgraceful, their parole system inequitable, racism everywhere. (Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1980).

      • Counter Punch ☛ Dorothy Day Didn’t Do It This Way

        To the uninitiated normie, this seemingly politically suicidal devotion to the Pro-Life cause might actually appear to be begrudgingly admirable regardless of your own personal position but what it really should provoke is a question that neither side seems to be particularly interested in asking anymore. What does it really mean to be Pro-Life in 2022?

      • Counter Punch ☛ The Challenges of Urbanization

        The Lesson of Beijing

      • TruthOut ☛ Poll Shows a Dead Heat Between Democrats, GOP in 2022 Midterms
      • TruthOut ☛ Biden Warns Democracy Is at Risk Thanks to Trump’s Refusal to Accept 2020 Loss
      • TruthOut ☛ The Racism of the Supreme Court’s Supermajority Was on Full Display This Week
      • Scheerpost ☛ Is Elon Musk the Best or the Worst for Twitter?

        Will Twitter recede to its Wild West days or will content moderation remain the same or perhaps worsen under Elon Musk?

      • TruthOut ☛ AOC Says Her Twitter Account Hasn’t Worked Properly Since She Criticized Musk
      • Techdirt ☛ As Musk Speedruns The Content Moderation Curve, Some Of His Biggest Fans Are Getting Mad At Him

        Yesterday, we gave Elon Musk a cheat sheet for speedrunning the content moderation learning curve that any website doing any kind of content moderation learns over time. As we noted earlier this year, it appeared that he did not understand the issues at all and was setting his fans up to be extremely disappointed once they realized that Twitter, like all other social media websites, was going to have to do some level of moderation. It’s the same lesson Parler, Gettr, and Truth Social all had to learn as well.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Elon Musk Plans to Profit From Twitter, Not Create a Town Square for Global Democracy

        Musk has shrewdly fostered a reputation for being a genius, deserving of his obscene wealth. But his private texts during Twitter deal negotiations, recently revealed in court documents during legal wrangling over the sale, paint a picture of a simple mind unable to come to terms with his excess. His idea of “fun” is having “huge amounts of money” to play with.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Musk-Owned Twitter Sued for Violating CA and Federal Law With Mass Layoffs

        The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in San Francisco shortly after Twitter employees, who are not unionized, began receiving emails late Thursday notifying them of the sweeping job cuts. Some learned they were among those losing their jobs when they were unable to access the company’s communication channels.

      • Counter Punch ☛ The U.S. Choice Not to End This War Is Fog Fact #1

        In fact, in the area of peace and war, fog facts are everywhere. The reason that I can survey a classroom at the start and end of an hour-long event and go from most people believing that wars can be justified to most people believing they cannot, is that it takes less than an hour to unload a small pile of fog facts, such as those about the dominant role the U.S. plays in weapons dealing and war, that it’s responsible for some 80% of international arms dealing, 90% of foreign military bases, and 50% of military spending, that the U.S. military arms, trains, and funds the militaries of 96% of the most oppressive governments on earth, that 3% of U.S. military spending could end starvation on earth, etc., etc. That the U.S. did not want Osama bin Laden put on trial, or that nonviolent action works — these are basic fog facts that many people are paid a great deal of money not to become aware of, and others remain unaware of voluntarily.

      • Counter Punch ☛ In a World of Speed, Will the Courts Go Down?

        The Eastern District — EDVA, as it’s better known — is notorious for its old-school rules. Unlike most legal venues, reporters and members of the public aren’t allowed to bring electronics of any kind into that courthouse. There are no lockers or storage units on-site. Each morning, I waited in line (along with half of the D.C. press corps) inside a small café across from the courthouse to pay $10 to store my phone and laptop underneath the cash register. Bereft of my devices, I was left to cover the Manafort case the way a reporter would have in the 1960s — with pen and paper, scrawling notes on a pad on my knee and later spending as much time deciphering those jottings as I did writing up the day’s events.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Democracy is on the Ballot

        This is not normal, friends. It means the water is boiling hot!

      • Counter Punch ☛ The Party of Violence

        Echoing him, Republican Marjorie Taylor Green “liked” a Facebook comment that “a bullet to the head would be quicker” than removing Pelosi through elections.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Dear Fellow Leftist: I’m Voting Democratic. Please Join Me.

        Dear Fellow Leftist…

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | This Election Is About Whether US Democracy Can Endure
      • Common Dreams ☛ Global Alarm as Netanyahu to Form Israel’s Most Right-Wing Government Ever

        “If you are shocked and horrified by this growing, emboldened Israeli fascist movement, ask yourself how you’ll commit to opposing Jewish supremacist ideology, policies, and institutions in days and years ahead,” Simone Zimmerman, co-founder of the American Jewish group IfNotNow, tweeted late Wednesday. “Fighting fascism, authoritarianism, and racism everywhere is our only hope.”

      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Harmful Actions of AIPAC Don’t Speak for Us’: Jewish-American Coalition Backs Summer Lee

        “In Congress, Summer Lee will fight for our community’s values and needs,” says the letter. “From standing up for women’s rights to protecting our democracy, she is the person we need to represent us at this pivotal moment in history.”

      • Common Dreams ☛ Judge Grants NY AG’s Request for Independent Monitor to Oversee Trump Organization

        “Time and time again, the courts have ruled that Donald Trump cannot evade the law for personal gain.”

      • Counter Punch ☛ Camelot’s Slurs: the Libeling of Adlai Stevenson

        In a crucial meeting on October 27 between Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, the first intimations were made that a quid pro quo arrangement could be reached.  If the Soviets were to pull out their missiles in Cuba, the US would return the favour regarding their missiles in Turkey.  That part of the agreement would, however, remain secret.  RFK, as the administration’s emissary, informed Dobrynin that his brother “is ready to come to agree on that question with N.S. Khrushchev.”  For the withdrawal to take place, however, some four to five months had to elapse.  “However, the president can’t say anything public in this regard about Turkey.”

      • Pro Publica ☛ Texas AG Has Been Criminally Investigating Election Workers

        But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is also working a different angle: His office has been criminally investigating the people who help run elections.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Bolsonaro Defeated at the Ballot Box, But What’s Next for Brazil?

        Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will find it difficult to govern for all in a Brazil torn in half but, despite the tensions, hope has won out and the transition has begun.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Why Democrats Should Not Run Away From Joe Biden

        I was standing next to a Democratic state legislator at a recent back-to-school event in Wisconsin as Democratic Governor Tony Evers announced he was dispensing $90 million in COVID-19 federal relief money for Wisconsin schools, courtesy of President Joe Biden.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Why are Some Black and Hispanic Men Voting Republican?

        Despite the attempt to eradicate the West’s Spanish culture, it remains a force.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Protecting Against Threats During the 2022 Midterm Election Cycle

        In the past week, reports have emerged of armed actors showing up at ballot drop boxes, spouting “big lie” messaging and other conspiracy theories, with the express aim of intimidation.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Will American Voters Really Let the Right Destroy Democracy?

        It’s said a frog will sit calmly in warming water until it boils. Will we do the same?

      • The Nation ☛ Vote the Working Families Party Line

        New York should have never been a battlefront—a state that Joe Biden won by 23 points and Obama by 27 points. But a combination of redistricting chaos, a disgraced former governor, and anticipated low turnout has turned New York’s gubernatorial contest into an uncomfortably tight race.

      • The Nation ☛ Voter Suppression Is Keeping Students From the Polls

        From August to October 2022, Kristina Samuel skipped almost every one of their Tuesday morning classes to fight for equal access to the ballot. Samuel, a senior biology major at Texas A&M University who uses both she/her and they/them pronouns, negotiated with their professor to be able to attend Brazos County’s Commissioners Court meetings, which occur every Tuesday at 10 am. Samuel joined a handful of other students and professors testifying for accessible polling locations for Texas A&M students and community members.

      • The Nation ☛ Will Republicans Gain Ground in California?
      • Common Dreams ☛ University of California Academic Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Strike

        “Our teaching assistants do the vast majority of the teaching work for UC, and we do basically all of the research.”

      • The Nation ☛ These Republicans Have a Plan: Rig Things So They “Never Lose Another Election”

        It is no secret that much of the Republican advantage in the 2022 midterm election cycle is based on gaming the system to favor the Grand Old Party.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Where’s the Truth in American Politics?

        For about a week in the summer of 2018, I caught an early-morning train from Washington, D.C., to the Albert V. Bryan federal courthouse in the suburb of Alexandria. Located a short drive from George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon, that courthouse serves the Eastern District of Virginia. It has played […]

      • Scheerpost ☛ GOP Ads Cry ‘Crime!’ But Homicides Are Actually Falling

        Rather than running on their unpopular agenda, Republicans are conjuring a “crime wave” to scare voters.

      • Craig Murray ☛ Braverman Loses the Dressing Room

        The only thing more remarkable than the number of classified documents the Home Secretary leaks to her mentors, is the number of civil servants leaking to the newspapers about Braverman leaking the documents.

      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Deputy Minister says there are many important issues to be discussed by Parliament, not just Swedish and Finnish NATO accession
      • The Nation ☛ Can Young Voters Make Palestinian Rights a Major Issue?

        Lara Hafez sometimes feels that she has been “robbed of her ethnicity.” After her parents were forced out of their home in the West Bank by the Israel Defense Forces, they sought refuge in America and settled in Southern California, where Hafez was born and raised. Now a junior at Stanford University, Hafez was especially moved when several students with ties to Israel reached out to thank her after she gave a speech on Palestinian politics.

      • The Nation ☛ How We Win the Midterms, Plus Black Landowners in North Carolina

        How can we save democracy from white nationalism and right-wing authoritarianism? Steve Phillips argues that we need to organize and turn out the millions of non-voters—people of color and young people—with a long-term, data-based strategy. Steve’s new book is How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good. Powered by RedCircle

      • The Nation ☛ Could Challenges to Individual Votes Swing the Outcome in Georgia?

        Kendra Davenport Cotton, the recently promoted CEO of the New Georgia Project, founded in 2014 by Stacey Abrams to increase voter participation by Black Georgians and other residents of color, wanted to share good news about the upcoming midterm election, where Abrams challenges Governor Brian Kemp in a rematch of 2018, and Senator Raphael Warnock faces an unexpectedly fierce challenge from former football star Herschel Walker.

      • The Nation ☛ Objects May Be Closer
      • Techdirt ☛ Declassified Report Shows DHS Tried To Fulfill Trump’s Antifa Fantasies When Handling Portland Protests

        After weeks of protests erupted following the murder of unarmed black man George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, President Trump made it clear he felt the protesters were the real problem. As he stated immediately following his election, he was here to end the “dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America.” He followed through with this threat by scrambling federal agencies to Portland, Oregon to quell dissent.

      • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

        • NPR ☛ Doctors and advocates tackle a spike of abortion misinformation – in Spanish

          The lab, a project from the national voter registration organization Voto Latino and the progressive group Media Matters for America, was launched in 2021 to combat COVID-19 disinformation and election falsehoods targeting Latinos.

          Lebrón says the misinformation she’s seeing runs the gamut — from posts that say abortion is no longer legal in a state where in fact it remains legal, to those that falsely say the procedure is not safe and can lead to harm or death. The falsehoods are being shared by accounts with tens of thousands of followers, she says.

          Abortion is safe and an essential component of comprehensive health care, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. With Roe struck down as of June 24, individual states determine abortion access — and abortion is currently legal in a majority of U.S. states.

        • NPR ☛ How documentary-style films turn conspiracy theories into a call to action

          There’s no evidence for any of this. The film, which is directed by right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza and relies on data and analysis from controversial election group True the Vote, has been thoroughly, and repeatedly, debunked by fact-checkers and rejected by law enforcement.

          But the film is the latest in a long line of movies that use the tropes and signifiers of documentaries to gain credibility. In recent years, documentary style films about the 2020 election, the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines have spread conspiracy theories and recycled debunked lies.

        • Techdirt ☛ Nobody Seems To Have An Answer For Propaganda Posing As Local News

          While traditional local papers deserve no shortage of blame for their failure to adapt, media scholars have long pointed out that media consolidation paved the way for a lot of the problems we’re seeing today. The end result of consolidation was the gradual elbowing out of small local news outfits, leaving the sector peppered with propaganda mills like Sinclair Broadcasting, or hollowed out, hedge fund run papers.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • TheNewArab ☛ Moroccan woman on hunger strike after jailed for ‘insulting Islam’: family

        Karim, 39, had been detained in July and later found guilty of “attacking the Islamic religion via electronic means,” after she posted satirical comments about the Quran on Facebook.

      • Frontpage Magazine ☛ Amazon Fascists Ban Another Book That Leftists Hate

        The battle for the freedom of speech is heating up this week, with Elon Musk chasing out the Twitter fascists and beginning to open up the platform for free discussion and dissent (amid howls of rage from the Left), but the other social media giants are showing no signs of retreating from their fascism. New English Review Press announced Sunday that a book it published back in 2017, The Islam in Islamic Terrorism: The Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideology by the renowned ex-Muslim scholar Ibn Warraq, has been pulled for sale from Amazon without explanation or the possibility of appeal.

      • Frontpage Magazine ☛ The Deleted History of Islam: An interview with Shillman Fellow Raymond Ibrahim.

        Italian publishers are disinclined to translate and publish books critical of Islam. You recently published Defenders of the West. Can you expose to our readers the content of the text?

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Big Tech’s Algorithms Are Built With Invisible Labor

        But while these unseeable processes shape our online experience, labor is exploited behind the scenes. For an enormous amount of algorithm development, especially in today’s fast-moving AI industry, much of the training is done by “microworkers” — men and women, often in the developing world, who are training these systems manually.

      • RFERL ☛ Marge Simpson Mural Supporting Women Reappears Near Iranian Consulate In Milan

        Italian artist aleXsandro Palombo told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda that the new work is called “The Cut 2″ and was designed and painted after “The Cut 1″ was removed from the wall in front of the consulate general less than 24 hours after it went up.

        While both murals show Marge cutting her trademark blue beehive hairdo, she is noticeably angrier in the second, showing her middle finger while scowling.

      • New York Times ☛ Cherokees Ask U.S. to Make Good on a 187-Year-Old Promise, for a Start

        The Cherokees were forced at gunpoint to honor the treaty. But though it stipulated that the Nation would be entitled to a nonvoting seat in the House of Representatives, Congress reneged on that part of the deal. Now, amid a growing movement across Indian Country for greater representation and sovereignty, the Cherokees are pushing to seat their delegate, 187 years later.

        “For nearly two centuries, Congress has failed to honor that promise,” Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, said in a recent interview in the Cherokee capital of Tahlequah, in eastern Oklahoma. “It’s time to insist the United States keep its word.”

      • New Republic ☛ Cherokee Nation Is Fighting for a Seat in Congress

        The treaty, authored after Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, stipulates that the Cherokee Nation “shall be entitled to a delegate in the House of Representatives in the United States whenever Congress shall make provision for the same.” A lesser-known trust obligation, it remained dormant until three years ago, when Hoskin tapped Kimberly Teehee to become the Nation’s delegate—despite any official authorization by the House to do so.

      • RFERL ☛ Videos Of Latest Protests In Iranian Cities Appear To Show Violent Response Of Security Forces

        Iranian protesters have gathered in the city of Karaj, northwest of Tehran, to mark 40 days since the death of Hadis Najafi, a 20-year-old woman who was shot dead by Iranian security forces near Tehran.

        Videos posted on social media show a large number of protesters in Karaj chanting “Death to Khamenei,” a reference to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and indicate the demonstrators clashed with security forces.

        One video of the protest in Karaj appears to show armed forces shooting in the air and directly at protesters as people take shelter in their cars.

        It was not possible to authenticate the videos, and there has been no comment from security forces in Karaj.

      • TruthOut ☛ Egypt Arrests Hundreds in Crackdown Ahead of COP27 Climate Summit
      • Counter Punch ☛ COP27 Egypt- Oh, Well!

        The Secretary-General has been beating that same drum for some time now, which prompts a thought: Should the UN stop holding annual COP “Conference of the Parties” climate change meetings? For 30 years straight, following each COP meeting, CO2 emissions have climbed higher than the year before. That’s thirty years, or an entire generation, of failure to slow emissions by even a teeny bit. It’s starting to get embarrassing.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | This Is an All-Hands-on-Deck Moment to Fight Climate Emergency

        At this month’s annual United Nations conference on climate change in Egypt, delegates from around the globe will encounter something new: a Climate Justice Pavilion in the official “Blue Zone,” where diplomats and policymakers gather. Finally, at this 27th Conference of the Parties—aka COP 27—environmental justice advocates will be in the zone where it happens, centering justice, focusing on equity, and highlighting the communities hit worst and first by the effects of climate change and our dirty-energy economy.

      • Democracy Now ☛ Egypt Arrests Hundreds in Crackdown Before COP27 Climate Summit; Pressured to Free Alaa Abd El-Fattah

        Egyptian authorities have arrested hundreds in a crackdown on dissenting voices ahead of COP27, the U.N. climate conference which starts Sunday in Sharm El-Sheikh. Fifteen Nobel laureates have signed an open letter asking world leaders to pressure Egypt into releasing its many political prisoners, including human rights activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who plans to intensify his six-month hunger strike by forgoing water on the opening day of the climate summit. “He’s organizing all of us from his prison cell,” says Democracy Now! correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous.

      • Counter Punch ☛ What to Expect from COP27 in Egypt’s Police State: An Interview With Sharif Abdel Kouddous

        MB: For those who don’t know or have forgotten, can you give us a quick overview of the nature of the present government in Egypt today?

      • Counter Punch ☛ Egypt Hosting COP27, the UAE COP28: What a COP Out!

        Sharm, as it is commonly referred to, has become Egypt’s hub for international conferences, festivals and events for one specific reason – it is far from Cairo. The resort reflects the image Cairo would like to convey to the world – tidy, unpolluted, not congested, and ‘modern’. It is also bereft of Egyptians (unless workers or wealthier residents) as permission is required for citizens to get through the multiple military check points that effectively separate the Sinai from mainland Egypt (tourists also require a separate visa to visit the rest of Egypt from the Sinai). Such controls are also in place due to Cairo’s decade long war against a ‘jihadist insurgency’ in the Sinai Peninsula.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | What to Expect From COP27 in Egypt’s Police State: An Interview With Sharif Abdel Kouddous

        The global climate meeting called COP27 (the 27th Conference of Parties) will be held in the remote Egyptian desert resort of Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt from November 6-18. Given the extremely repressive nature of the Egyptian government, this gathering will likely be different from others, where there have been large, raucous protests led by civil society groups.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Reviewing the 25th Anniversary of Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection

        Hartman, Professor of English at Columbia University, first wrote Scenes of Subjection near the close of the twentieth century and “persuasively argued for a critical analysis of the modes of empathetic identification at work in narratives of physical violence against the bodies of slaves.”[3] By linking a study of race and identity with literary performance, Hartman wrote as a revisionist scholar using the archive within a Cultural Poetic and New Historicistintellectual framework. She provided contributions to the fields of cultural history and social psychology and interrogated the narratives of slave violence (scenes) that emerged predominantly from white accounts (subjection) thereby tragically erasing the black body and their agency. She captured the essence of violence and antiblackness in referring to the objectification of the slave. Hartman first wrote in 1997 that “the slave is the object or the ground that makes possible the existence of the bourgeois subject and, by negation or contradistinction, defines liberty, citizenship, and the enclosures of the social body.”[4] This powerful quote reveals the significance of Hartman’s work that merits the book’s commemorative reissuing.  In the new edition’s Introduction, just across from one of several hauntingly beautiful compositions by artist Torkwase Dyson depicting “a gesture toward other planes,” Hartman describes:

      • Counter Punch ☛ Protecting Human Rights the Euro-Med Monitor Way

        To begin with, EMM is youth-oriented and much of its work is done by volunteers who learn by doing and working as teams with more experienced defenders of human rights. By adopting this mode of work, EMM has avoided diversions of its energies by major fundraising efforts, preferring to move forward with a small budget offset by big ideas, an impressive record of performance, continually motivated by outrage resulting from the widespread wrongdoing of governments throughout MENA. The initial idea of Euro-Med Monitor was inspired by popular rebellions against tyranny and oppression. This spirit of resistance swept through the Arab region in 2011 and continues to make its influence felt everywhere. Euro-Med Monitor strives to support these movements by planting seeds for international mobilization and stimulating international organizations and decision-makers to focus on violations of the people’s right to expression, freedom, and self-determination.

      • FAIR ☛ ‘This Is America. That’s the Kind of Trial Mumia Abu-Jamal Had.’

        Janine Jackson interviewed Prison Radio‘s Noelle Hanrahan for a Mumia Abu-Jamal update for the October 28, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ The grandma housecoat was one of the most popular garments of socialism, even though it only gave women a semblance of equality
      • Techdirt ☛ Court Reminds Cops That Pointing A Bunch Of Guns At Someone Doesn’t Make A Search Consensual

        Perhaps the last people who should be asked to define “consent” would be cops. They exist in an alternate reality where only those cuffed and/or beaten to a pulp can plausibly raise a claim that their questioning or search was non-consensual. This possibly explains why so many cops get charged with sexual assault, as well as their ongoing inability to exist in domestic situations without engaging in violence.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • AccessNow ☛ #KeepItOn via U.S. Summit for Democracy Technology Cohort – Access Now

        At the recent Tallinn Digital Summit in Estonia, Access Now presented testimony from #KeepItOn Partner, Teklehaymanot Geremeskel calling on human rights organizations to push for an end to the ongoing two-years long internet “blockade” in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.

        Since the conflict began in Tigray in November 2020, authorities have used deliberate and sustained internet and telecommunication shutdowns as a weapon of information control and censorship, directly impacting the lives of approximately six million people in the region, as well as their networks and communities abroad.

        The weaponization of internet shutdowns by authorities in Ethiopia and across the world is on the rise, resulting in violation of people’s right to access a free, open, and secure internet. The need to align on digital rights issues and coordinate a unified response in defense of civil society is greater than ever.

      • Hate speech spikes on Musk’s watch; another internet blackout in Myanmar; Egypt’s paranoia on show at COP27 – Coda Story

        The pile of problems wrought by Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover is growing by the minute. When staff tasked with keeping harmful speech off the platform were suddenly locked out of internal systems, reports of violent, hateful, and otherwise bad speech immediately spiked. This is troubling on the eve of U.S. midterm elections, but as I wrote last April, the ramifications could be much worse in other parts of the world — indeed, my colleague Kofi Yeboah reports that Twitter’s Africa team is “gradually dissolving.” Soon after he “sank” into Twitter’s HQ, Musk began promising to form a “content moderation council” in the near term. But coming from the notorious Twitter troll who has already fired the company’s best brain on the issue, this doesn’t bring much comfort. I’m also wary of the reported plan to charge users a monthly fee to maintain their “verified” status — research has shown how this feature provides important protection against impersonation for journalists in high-risk environments.

    • Digital Restrictions (DRM)

    • Monopolies

      • Techdirt ☛ Dude Who Filed Ridiculous Lawsuit Over Title Of Mariah Carey’s Most Famous Song Drops Case After Pretending They Sound The Same

        Back in June we wrote about an absolutely ridiculous lawsuit filed by a guy named Andy Stone, but who performs as Vince Vance and the Valiants, against Mariah Carey, claiming copyright infringement from her song “All I Want for Christmas is You.” As we noted at the time, the only similarity between the two songs is the title and the theme, and neither of those are covered by copyright. Indeed, there are other songs that predated Stone’s song that also have the same title. The Carey song and the Vance song (released five years earlier) sound nothing alike.

      • Trademarks

        • Techdirt ☛ IKEA Bullies Indie Developer Into Changing Game Set In A Furniture Store

          Big businesses really should know better as to how trademark law works. Or, failing that, their corporate counsels should. And yet we see far too often that big businesses take an aggressive approach to anything remotely resembling trademark infringement that they do not like.

      • Copyrights

        • Torrent Freak ☛ ‘U.S. Authorities Seize Z-Library Domain Names’

          Several domains related to popular ebook repository Z-Library became inaccessible a few hours ago. DNS records and other information suggest that the shadow library was targeted by the Postal Inspection Service, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Justice. Confusingly, Z-Library says that the downtime is linked to a hosting issue.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ Record Labels Win $47 Million Piracy Liability Verdict Against ISP Grande

          Internet provider Grande Communications is liable for the copyright infringements of its subscribers, a Texas federal jury has ruled. The ISP is guilty of willful contributory copyright infringement and must pay a group of prominent record labels $47 million in damages.

        • Andy Baio ☛ Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model

          Using 32 of her illustrations, MysteryInc152 fine-tuned Stable Diffusion to recreate Hollie Mengert’s style. He then released the checkpoint under an open license for anyone to use. The model uses her name as the identifier for prompts: “illustration of a princess in the forest, holliemengert artstyle,” for example.

          The post sparked a debate in the comments about the ethics of fine-tuning an AI on the work of a specific living artist, even as new fine-tuned models are posted daily. The most-upvoted comment asked, “Whether it’s legal or not, how do you think this artist feels now that thousands of people can now copy her style of works almost exactly?”

        • Rest of World ☛ AI-generated art sparks furious backlash from Japan’s anime community

          While there’s a long-established culture of creating fan art from copyrighted manga and anime, many are drawing a line in the sand where AI creates a similar artwork. Rest of World spoke to generative AI companies, artists, and legal experts, who saw this backlash as being rooted in the intense loyalty of anime and manga circles — and, in Japan, the lenient laws on copyright and data-scraping. The rise of these models isn’t just blurring lines around ownership and liability, but already stoking panic that artists will lose their livelihoods.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ Premier League Celebrates “Success” as IPTV Pirate Walks Out of Court

          The owner of pirate IPTV service Marvel Streams UK appeared in court this week expecting to go to prison, but after being handed a suspended sentence, he walked away. While police, the Premier League, and FACT, used glowing terms to announce the “successful” prosecution, it’s unlikely to have met expectations, potentially due to a significant change in tactics.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ MPA: Mandatory Release Windows Could Exacerbate Piracy

          Over recent decades, theatrical movie release windows have shrunk significantly around the world. In France, however, movie fans still have to wait more than a year before they can stream the latest blockbusters. The MPA flags this mandatory release window as a potential trade barrier, with the potential make piracy even worse.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • 🔤SpellBinding: AFINOTX Wordo: ELBOW
      • Organizing applying to grants, conferences, calls, etc

        I apply to a number of grants, Call for Artists, Requests for Proposals, proposals for conference talks, and more. I usually apply to about half a dozen or so a month, though sometimes many more.

        When I was first applying to things a few years ago I met with a friend who showed me how she did it. She used a google spreadsheet. I copied some parts of her system and then built my own system that I’ve been using for years now. It’s simple and works for me. Feel free to use any of this info, which is pretty basic, in case it works for you.

      • Friday link roundup: November 4, 2022

    • Technical

      • Science

        • New Contact Method: Post

          Ever since I got my first fountain pen about three years ago, I’ve been wanting to find more reasons to write. I would sometimes jot down a note at my desk or write a personal cheque, but it’s been difficult for me to get into any serious writing projects. The fact that I now work from home has made me even less motivated to use paper instead of terminals in recent weeks.

          I’ve also yearned for more personal and human forms of contact with other people since the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic. When I was young, I had pen pals, and I miss the excitement of receiving a hand-written letter in the post from somewhere far away.

      • Programming

        • Writing Yet Another Static Site Generator

          After my last post where I mentioned Idiomdrottning.org, Sandra (Idiomdrottning) wrote to me and explained how it really worked, because not all her content is published both on web and gemini, as I originally thought.

          And having had that rummaging around in my head for a few days, I am pretty fired up about building something like that for myself. I guess I could ask Sandra for the code to her setup, but what’s the fun in that?

          So, basically, write articles in markdown, with extra macros in there to handle how links work in HTML and gemtext, then create some sort of naming convention, file header or folder hierarchy to decide which file gets processed for gemini. web or both.

* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.

Links 04/11/2022: GParted Live 1.4.0-6 and Diffoscope 226 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 7:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Server

      • Net2 ☛ Docker container orchestration tools

        The rise of containers has changed the way programmers think about developing, deploying and maintaining software applications. Using the capabilities of native isolation of modern operatingsystems, containers support a separation of concerns similar to virtual machines, but without consuming too many resources and greater deployment flexibility compared with virtual machines.

        Containers are so lightweight and flexible that they have spawned new application architectures. This new approach consists of packaging the different services that make up an application in separate containers and then deploying those containers across a cluster of physical or virtual machines.

      • Kubernetes Blog ☛ Live and let live with Kluctl and Server Side Apply | Kubernetes

        This blog post was inspired by a previous Kubernetes blog post about Advanced Server Side Apply. The author of said blog post listed multiple benefits for applications and controllers when switching to server-side apply (from now on abbreviated with SSA). Especially the chapter about CI/CD systems motivated me to respond and write down my thoughts and experiences.

        These thoughts and experiences are the results of me working on Kluctl for the past 2 years. I describe Kluctl as “The missing glue to put together large Kubernetes deployments, composed of multiple smaller parts (Helm/Kustomize/…) in a manageable and unified way.”

    • Kernel Space

      • Bootlin ☛ Welcome to Jérémie Dautheribes – Bootlin’s blog

        Bootlin is really happy to welcome another engineer in its team: Jérémie Dautheribes, who joined us on November 2, 2022.

        Jérémie Dautheribes graduated in 2020 with a master degree in Ambiant, Mobile and Embedded Systems from the Toulouse University. After graduating, he worked at the french research institute INRIA on cache optimization for FreeRTOS multicore programs, and then in a company called EPSI where he was in charge of developing and maintaining Linux-based BSPs for i.MX6 and Tegra platforms, based on Yocto.

    • Applications

      • It’s FOSS ☛ FOSS Weekly #22.41: Zorin OS 16.2, CLI Tools, Discord Bots and More

        As promised a few weeks ago, the newsletter landing page is now ready. It highlights the features of the FOSS Weekly newsletter and testimonials from regular readers among other stuff.

        You can now share it in various Linux communities you are part of and encourage them to subscribe.

        Also, I am collecting more testimonials about It’s FOSS as a complete portal and they will be listed on a dedicated page. You can send yours by replying to this email :)

      • It’s FOSS ☛ 10 Best Open Source Bots for Your Discord Server

        If it is your first time hearing about it, consider it something like Slack, but with countless fun functionalities to create communities (i.e., servers).

        Among all the features, Discord bots allow automating things or spice up your server. But most of them are proprietary. So, in this list, I suggest some of the best open-source Discord bots.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Linux Hint ☛ Syslog Tutorial

        “Syslog is a way of consolidating logs from various systems to a remote Syslog server. The Syslog server has three key components. The first is a listener that utilizes UDP over port 514 to gather Syslog data. Next is the database that stores the generated Syslog data, and lastly, the management and filtering software that allows filtering the Syslog data for quick troubleshooting.

        As a system administrator, understanding how Syslog works and how to configure client machines to channel their Syslog data to the remote server comes in handy. This guide discusses Syslog in Linux and offers steps for consolidating logs to a remote machine.”

      • Linux Hint ☛ How to Install KDE Plasma on Ubuntu 22.04

        “KDE Plasma refers to the KDE desktop environment, and it is among the most intuitive and easy-to-use desktop environments. It has plenty of features, and you will love its consistent user experience across various devices. Moreover, its modern look is impressive and if you are yet to install it on your Ubuntu 22,04, today’s your lucky day.

        We will present the steps for installing KDE Plasma on Ubuntu 22.04. Let’s get started.”

      • Junichi Uekawa: Found the reason podman build was failing as normal user.

        Found the reason podman build was failing as normal user. dbus-user-session was missing and podman wasn’t able to connect to systemd user session. This resulted in trying to use cgroupfs instead of systemd for managing cgroups and other things also broke.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Wine (WineHQ) on Pop!_OS 22.04 | 20.04

        Wine is a software application that translates Windows system calls into POSIX-compliant functions. This allows users to run Windows applications on POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, BSD, and macOS. Wine is not an emulator and does not require a copy of Windows to be installed. Instead, it uses its own set of libraries to provide the necessary functionality. Wine is open-source software released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The following tutorial will show you how to install the latest version using the command line terminal.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install SeaMonkey on Ubuntu 22.10 | 22.04 | 20.04

        SeaMonkey is a free and open-source Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code, which grew out of Netscape Communicator and formed the base of Netscape 6 and Netscape 7. The SeaMonkey project intends to deliver a complete, seamless integration of Internet applications in one easy-to-use package with a browser, email- and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and simple HTML editing included. The following tutorial will demonstrate how to install SeaMonkey Internet Suite on your Ubuntu desktop from Ubuntuzilla.

      • Red Hat Official ☛ Add listening ports to firewalld with Ansible | Enable Sysadmin

        Ansible’s community.general.listen_ports_facts module finds all listening TCP and UDP ports on your system.

      • LinuxConfig ☛ How to format data with Column in Linux

        Column is a free and open source utility usually installed as part of the util-linux package in all the most common Linux distribution, and therefore included in even the most minimal installations. With this utility we can organize the content of files or the output of other commands in columns, creating pretty tables or even producing JSON formatted documents.

        In this tutorial we see how to use the “column” utility to format the content of a file as a table or JSON on Linux.

      • TecMint ☛ How to Install and Use VirtualBox in RHEL 9/8

        In this tutorial, we look at how to install VirtualBox 7.0 in RHEL 9 and RHEL 8 distributions to create guest virtual machines using an ISO image file.

        Oracle VM VirtualBox is a popular free and open-source virtualization software that is widely used by desktop lovers and even system administrators and programmers to create virtual machines for various purposes such as testing operating systems.

        As a type 2 hypervisor, VirtualBox is installed on top of an operating system such as Windows and Linux. It supports a wide range of guest systems including Windows, Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris, and OpenSolaris.

      • Make Tech Easier ☛ How to Control DC Motors With the Raspberry Pi – Make Tech Easier

        Whether it’s for a micromouse robot or a tiny IoT electric fan, knowing how to make things run using DC motors with the Raspberry Pi can unlock a broad range of creative DIY projects to keep you busy. For this guide, we are using an L298N motor controller in Raspberry Pi to send electricity to a pair of DC motors and make them spin!

      • DebugPoint ☛ How to Install Latest LibreOffice in Ubuntu and other Linux

        Here’s a quick guide on how to install the latest LibreOffice version in Ubuntu and other Linux.

        The free and open-source office suite LibreOffice comes in two versions. The Community and Enterprise versions. The “community” version is for early adopters who want the latest bleeding-edge software tech. And the “enterprise” version is more stable and may not include all the latest features, but it is ideal for the production environment and professional work.

      • DebugPoint ☛ How to Enable ’Dark Mode’ in LibreOffice

        Tutorial for you on how to enable dark mode in LibreOffice in Ubuntu, Linux and Windows systems.

        LibreOffice, the free and open-source office productivity software, is used by millions worldwide. This cross-platform software runs on Windows, Linux, and other distributions.

        Millions of users around the world use LibreOffice. Probably that includes you. And everyone seems to prefer dark mode these days. And there are some advantages as well.

        Research suggests that dark mode protects eyes for extended use of mobiles and computers and saves a bit of battery as well, especially for AMOLED displays. That’s not all, dark mode makes the text looks crisp and clear and improves productivity.

      • Linux Capable ☛ 2 Ways to Install Audacious on Ubuntu 22.10 | 22.04 | 20.04

        Audacious is one of the best music players around. Not only is it open-source, but it’s also straightforward to use. With drag ‘n’ drop functionality, you can easily add your favorite songs to your playlist and start listening immediately. Another great feature of Audacious is if you’re worried about the app stealing resources from other tasks on your computer, don’t be! It’s specifically designed to use minimal resources so that you can listen to your music without problems. Plus, with different skins available, you can customize Audacious to look however you want. The following tutorial will cover the installation using the command line terminal on Ubuntu.

      • DebugPoint ☛ Upgrade to Latest LibreOffice in Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Windows

        This beginner’s guide explains the steps required to upgrade to the latest LibreOffice in Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Windows.

      • Linux Capable ☛ 2 Ways to Install Code::Blocks on Ubuntu 22.10 | 22.04 | 20.04

        Code::Blocks is a free and open-source software highly extensible Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for the C, C++, and Fortran programming languages. It features support for a wide range of compilers, parallel builds, and multi-target projects and also provides an interface with GNU GDB. The code editor in Code::Blocks features syntax highlighting, code folding, a tabbed interface, code completion, a class browser, and smart indenting. Code::Blocks is one of the most popular IDEs for C++ development and is used by many companies and organizations worldwide. The following tutorial will teach you how to install Code::Blocks on an Ubuntu desktop using the command line terminal.

      • TecAdmin ☛ 10 Simple Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Website – TecAdmin

        Did you know that the average user will abandon your website if it takes longer than 5 seconds to load? That’s right, if your website loads too slowly, users will get frustrated and leave. In fact, Statistica reports that 47% of online shoppers will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. If you’ve ever spent time browsing the Internet, you’ll know how crucial speed is to keep users engaged. It doesn’t matter how great your content is or how good your site looks – if it doesn’t load fast enough, people won’t stick around long enough to find out. Luckily, there are lots of ways you can optimize your website so that it loads faster than ever before.

        Your website is the first impression your potential customers will have of your business. Whether it’s a personal blog or an eCommerce store, you want your site to look great and load quickly. If you find yourself often frustrated by slow page loads and lagging performance, it’s time to consider speeding up your WordPress site. A fast website not only makes users happy but also helps search engines index your pages faster. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some easy ways to make your site faster than ever before.

        In this blog post, we will discuss a few ways to speed up your WordPress website.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • Ubuntu Pit ☛ Masalla Icon Theme: Inspired by the Latest Flat Design Trend

        The Masalla icon theme is a perfect choice for anyone looking to spruce up their Linux desktop. The theme comes with more than 15,000 different icons, including a wide variety of options for applications, devices, categories, places/folders, and much more. It’s also compatible with the most popular Linux desktops like Gnome, Cinnamon, Xfce, Unity, KDE, Mate, LXDE, and others.

        If you have any interest in design, you’ve probably noticed that the current trend is ‘flat’ looks. And I absolutely love it! Hayder Majid, an Iraqi engineer, created this flat Masalla icon theme. The name of his project was “Obelisk” in Arabic and Uruk city (like the Obelisk of Hammurabi in the History of Iraq).

        I had wanted to write about the Masalla icon theme for a long time because I really liked it. Unfortunately, there have been no updates from the developer in over 4 years. Recently, though, an updated version of Masalla was released 3 months ago.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Programming/Development

      • OpenSource.com ☛ How to iterate over tables in Lua | Opensource.com

        In the Lua programming language, an array is called a table. A table is used in Lua to store data. If you’re storing a lot of data in a structured way, it’s useful to know your options for retrieving that data when you need it.

      • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ RProtoBuf 0.4.20 on CRAN: Maintenance

        A new release 0.4.20 of RProtoBuf arrived on CRAN earlier today. RProtoBuf provides R with bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers (“ProtoBuf”) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed very widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol.

        This release is somewhat mechanical and in the spirit of many other recent releases. clang-15 is, as more recent compilers do, more stringent on definitions and wants to see some void in argument-less signatures. Happy to oblige. At the same time, GitHub Actions started to nag us about minimum versions of node code so an upgrade to a newer action is warranted, again as with many other affected packages. We also found another http:// URL hiding somewhere so that was cleaned. Lastly, it appears Protocol Buffers themselves moved on and now need / prefer C++17 so were happy to oblige.

  • Leftovers

    • Hardware

    • Security

      • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – Helping Optus spin breach fallout: the AFR shows the way

        One reason why a company like Singtel Optus can leak customer data in a breach that is, by all accounts, its own fault and then avoid being held to account is because of the media’s fawning coverage.

        A typical example can be seen in Friday’s Australian Financial Review, which carried an interview about what the Optus chairman Paul O’Sullivan has learnt from the breach. Of course, it’s good to know that the man has learnt something.

        For context, Optus has been dragged kicking and screaming to pledge that it would pay for replacing the passports that were leaked. Only this morning, the ABC reported that the company had been made to extend this to holders of foreign passports as well – after the matter had been ventilated on the 7.30 program.

        The telco is still refusing to pay for the replacement of driving licences, only expressing a willingness to pay for the administration expenses associated with issuing these forms of ID.

      • Diffoscope ☛ diffoscope 226 released

        The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 226. This version includes the following changes:

        [ Christopher Baines ]

        * Add an lzip comparator with tests.

        [ Chris Lamb ]

        * Add support for comparing the “text” content of HTML files using html2text.

        (Closes: #1022209, reproducible-builds/diffoscope#318)

        * Misc/test improvements:

        * Drop the ALLOWED_TEST_FILES test; it’s mostly just annoying.

        * Drop other copyright notices from lzip.py and test_lzip.py.

        * Use assert_diff helper in test_lzip.py.

        * Pylint tests/test_source.py.

        [ Mattia Rizzolo ]

        * Add lzip to debian dependencies.

      • Hacker News ☛ CISA Warns of Critical Vulnerabilities in 3 Industrial Control System Software

        The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published three Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories about multiple vulnerabilities in software from ETIC Telecom, Nokia, and Delta Industrial Automation.

        Prominent among them is a set of three flaws affecting ETIC Telecom’s Remote Access Server (RAS), which “could allow an attacker to obtain sensitive information and compromise the vulnerable device and other connected machines,” CISA said.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • AccessNow ☛ Two years of internet shutdowns: people in Tigray, Ethiopia, deserve better – Access Now

        Today, November 4, 2022, marks two years since authorities implemented internet shutdowns in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. After 730 days, this must come to an end.

        As peace talks between the government of Ethiopia and Tigray regional forces show positive signs of a ceasefire, this is the moment to reconnect all — everybody, from civil society to the African Union, has a responsibility to stand up and demand action.

        “For two years — 730 days — millions of people in Tigray have been forced to survive through a horrific war, their circumstances exacerbated by a deliberate internet shutdown that prevents them from communicating with family and friends, accessing potentially life-saving information, and letting the world know what’s happening in their region,” said Felicia Anthonio, #KeepItOn Campaign Manager at Access Now. “Authorities must reconnect Tigray now.”

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Azhdahak II
      • The Efficacy Of Live Music

        Tonight I paid for my first-ever official live music event. Not a free one, mind you. Fifteen dollars for entry, fifteen dollars well-spent for an entire night wherein the air became electric with sound, where the potential of humanity to channel emotion and effort into invisible audio waves became tangible.

        I am considering the legitimacy of music journalism, its relationship with music, how well I can straddle both fields- production, mastering, composition, layering- a veritable balancing act. Journalism is, regardless of the others, a channel worthy of respect, of serious pursuit. It has gone from being a minor fascination of mine, a mere passing interest, into an obsession over which I would shell out $15 if I believed the band was worthy enough.

      • Season’s First Snow

        Life is scary right now – I’m not too sure about the future at all, and the past has a seductive iridescence to it – but it still feels correct to mark the small beautiful things like this. It probably snowed back at home weeks ago, but here, it’s the first.

      • Let’s talk about how we talk about sex and entitlement

        For those of us who are women with strong sex drives, comments that make universal declarations about the extent to which sexual interaction is a ‘real’ need is yet another instance of women being invalidated and told what our needs ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ be – and also, effectively, another form of slut-shaming.

      • Shoe-wax day

        A few days ago I noticed that my hiking shoes are really in need of some TLC. So, today I had a shoe-wax day, waxing all our hiking boots.

        My wife and I each have two pairs of hiking boots, and one pair of hiking shoes. So, that means six pairs of shoes to wax, or twelve shoes.

    • Technical

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Mirroring sources used in nixpkgs (software preservation)

          This may appear like a very niche use case, in my quest of software conservancy for nixpkgs I didn’t encounter many people understanding why I was doing this.

          I would like to present you a project I made to easily download all the sources files required to build packages from nixpkgs, allowing to keep offline copies.

          Why would you like to keep a local copy? If upstream disappear, you can’t get access to the sources anymore, except maybe in Hydra, but you rely on a third party to access the sources, so it’s still valuable to have local copies of software you care about, just to make copies. It’s not that absolutely useful for everyone, but it’s always important to have such tools available.

        • Barriers to Gemini

          A frequent criticism of Gemini, and a topic that arises on Gemini itself from time to time, is that the protocol gatekeeps. Specifically, it has a barrier to entry for viewing content, and an even higher one for posting content. Szczeżuja mentioned^ a recent discussion about the matter on Mastodon, and JeanG3nie gave a reply^^ yesterday that resonated with me.

          In a way, talking about these issues on Gemini is a little self-defeating, and it’s fresh meat for Gemini’s detractors. “Gemini doesn’t have a high barrier to entry”, we say in our gemlogs, which the critics probably won’t read because they don’t want to install a client or use a proxy. The fact that they don’t see the responses proves their point, right? That’s all the convincing they need.

* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.

IRC Proceedings: Thursday, November 03, 2022

Posted in IRC Logs at 2:18 am by Needs Sunlight

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